Why use Shopfitter for your e-commerce enterprise?

By providing our ecommerce website building software free Shopfitter takes the initial costs away from the startup of your webshop, significantly reducing your risk. We only start charging you when you start making sales which means you can spend your start up money where it will do the most good - marketing your site.

Shopfitter 4 has been conceived to create web shops that are search engine friendly. The web pages are all flat html, navigation links are all standard html and category, info and product page titles are all automatically generated to match the names of the page content and files - critical for SEO.

Website design themes are handled using cascading stylesheets (CSS), the benefit of this is that it reduces the amount of code used to instruct the web browser how to display the page content. This is important because search engines give higher ranking to web pages that have a high content to code ratio - no other system has has such efficient layout code.

Clearly designed, simple navigation is a crucial component in a successful ecommerce website; Shopfitter automatically creates category pages that contain product listings, thumbnail images and short descriptions. In addition, prices and 'buy now' functionality are displayed at the category level meaning that your customers are never more than one click away from buying your goods. Clicking on either the product name or the image leads the customer to the product details page where they can view a full size image and read all the information you have provided to help them make their choice.

In short, Shopfitter gives you the best chance to build a successful online business at an affordable price.

To download Shopfitter 4 visit the download page. If you want a quick professional ecommerce website building for you please contact us.

How does Shopfitter compare with other webshop development software?

Actinic Actinic Catalog - this is a very good application and is feature rich, providing a variety of excellent options as well as creating some good, optimised websites.

Some comments we've heard are that users who aren't very computer literate find it quite complicated to understand; the file structure (i.e. all files are placed in a folder called 'acatalog') can reduce the effectiveness of the other good SEO features. If you purchase the Developer edition you can create multiple shops, otherwise you're limited to only one. We've also seen some sites generated in 'frames' which is a major problem when trying to get the best search engine ranking possible.

Actinic charges for ongoing services such as use of their order server and for phone support, £100 and £250 plus VAT per year respectively. In comparison, Shopfitter provides both of these free during business hours as part of the £1 per order charging structure - you only pay per use. You can also create as many webshops as you like on a variety of domain names. Actinic offer a range of options costing from £329 plus VAT.

Click and Build - recently updated with a nice set of new design templates, Click and Build provides a simple to use, low cost, hosted system. In general it is better suited as a 'bolt on' webshop to your existing website due to a number of factors. Because Click and Build is a database driven system it generates product catalogue pages with long URLs (web page addresses) that don't relate well to either your site name or product. The effect of this is that the search engines will 'promote' similar pages with a short URL over the longer one in a search. Another drawback is the lack of flexibility in managing the technical SEO items and that you don't 'own' your web pages (due to them being part of a greater online system). C&B mitigates the SEO shortcomings in its system by offering a monthly web marketing service, this is a chargeable service and you can expect to spend at least £70 per month as well as relying on pay per click advertising to get high search rankings.

Online support is free, however, there is a 30p per minute premium rate charge for phone support only available during business hours. Prices start from £29.95 plus VAT per month or £299.95 plus VAT per year for up to 45 products - you pay more as your catalogue grows.

In comparison, Shopfitter provides an unlimited catalogue, free daytime phone support, ownership of your webpages on your own computer and much greater in built SEO.

ShopFactory - One of the earliest ecommerce applications from this Australian company, it is a very low cost and well used programme worldwide, offering a low start option for up to 50 items for only £99. ShopFactory is very simple to use and provides a large number of styles to choose from for your online store giving you a good professional looking and functional site. The navigational items appear to be all html based (some systems use javascript or images which block search engine robots) which is a positive factor, however, the use of a frameset (where each webpage viewed is actually made up of more than one html file) for the layout is a major problem in achieving high search rankings - so much so that most web marketing companies when approached to improve performance will immediately advise a site rebuild using a non-frames set up similar to that provided by Shopfitter. ShopFactory offers quick online support, but their phone support is chargeable - the price doesn't appear to be published on their website so hasn't been factored into the comparison here. At £259 ShopFactory appears to represent good value, however, return on investment will be lower than expected due to the SEO/frameset issues.

The purpose of this comparison is not to criticise our competitors, each has different strengths and weaknesses (including Shopfitter!!!) and need to be evaluated depending on the circumstances of your own business requirements.